On November 21, hundreds of thousands of Colombians poured into the streets all over the country. A diverse coalition including labor unions, indigenous organizations, the student movement, and LGBT activist groups had called for a paro nacional, a general strike, in the country.

The outpouring of citizens defied all expectations. The streets of the main cities like Bogotá, Medellín, and Bucaramanga, but also of smaller cities like the Amazon towns of Puerto Asís, were carpeted with strikers.

The strike was planned months in advance in response to the number of labor, tax, and pension reforms referred to as Iván Duque’s “paquetazo,” or “the package,” which promised to deepen the country’s inequality, the second-highest in Latin America. However, as the strike approached, organizers’ demands broadened to include full implementation of the country’s peace agreements, environmental protection, and denouncing the assassination of social justice leaders and of gender violence. The streets on November 21 revealed the melee of demands: those with fins on their heads protesting the legalization of shark hunting were particularly visible, as were the broken dolls mourning the army’s assassination of eight minors killed in a bomb attack against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) dissidents in Caquetá.